


Sambucus

by Wickedrider98



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Blood, Body Horror, In a similar way to Jon and Basira performing surgery on Melanie, Like. A lot of body horror, Medical Conditions, Medical Inaccuracies, Rusty Fears piece repurposed as a statementfic, Surgery, Surgical Scars, Takes place during season 1 or 2, The Flesh - Freeform, and tbh probably a lot of, kind of?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-25
Updated: 2020-03-25
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:48:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,494
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23307820
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wickedrider98/pseuds/Wickedrider98
Summary: Statement of Indigo Nelson, regarding a series of strange medical procedures.
Kudos: 12





	Sambucus

Statement of Indigo Nelson, regarding a series of strange medical procedures. Original statement given 12 October 2008, audio recording by Jonathan Sims, Head Archivist of the Magnus Institute, London. Statement begins:

The human body is poorly designed. With spines not meant for walking and knees not meant for running, we are machines made with inherent design flaws etched deep in our genetic coding. Mine, it seemed, was more poorly designed than most. What’s the point of having a stomach that doesn’t digest properly? A heart that spazzes into shallow, rapid beats that don’t pump nearly as much blood as they should? My body hasn’t ever worked properly, and that was my normal, just a stasis I’d just come to accept. You get good at adjusting, remember to take your medicine every day, and that’s about all you can do. 

I was twenty when the dreams started. It was summer and, being free of the constraints of early class times and work hours, I took to staying up late at night and sleeping until late in the afternoon. This night, however, my late night was not by choice. My body had become more unruly than usual, and pain was ripping through my lower stomach as though something inside was trying to make its way out. I tossed and turned in the darkness, attempting to find a way in which I could lay that would lessen the discomfort. It wasn’t until around four in the morning that I was finally too tired to continue and gave into the crushing weight of exhaustion.

When I next opened my eyes, I found myself laid in a forest, the path ahead of me lined with trees faintly outlined against a starless sky. I pulled myself to my feet and began to move forward, propelled by some unseen force. The trail ahead of me was a great stone thing, sprawling out deep into woods ahead of me until I could no longer see it. I could have stayed walking on the path forever, _should_ have stayed walking on the path forever, but when I caught sight of a cave, partially hidden by draping trees, my curiosity got the best of me. I walked along the soft springy grass stained a deep ashen gray by the night. I reached the gaping mouth of the cave in what felt like no time. My hand brushed the moss that grew in thick patches on the ancient stone as I made my way inside, keeping close to the wall as I wandered through the black. From further ahead of me, I could hear what sounded like labored breathing, deep and wheezing and suffocated. I called out into the darkness, asking if anyone was there and if they needed help. My calls were answered by more wheezing, growing more desperate and emphatic. I began to walk towards it, speeding up when it began to grow louder and louder until it began to let out strangled shrieks. I rounded the corner to where the being was, but as I did I was forced awake by bright sunlight gleaming through the blinds. I groaned and forced myself out of bed. The stomach flareup of the previous night had faded away, something I was thankful for. It wasn't uncommon for sleep to provide a temporary solution to my pain, and nothing about it seemed unusual. Not until I went to the shower and saw the scar. It was situated on my lower abdomen, thin and clean with the precision of a surgeon’s scalpel. I knew it hadn’t been there when I fell asleep, but the mark looked as though it had been there for days. No blood came from the area and it didn't hurt to the touch. It was strange, but I couldn't think of anything that could have caused the cut. And certainly not anything that would have healed that quickly. I decided to keep my eye on it. Telling my parents would have proven to be ineffective, telling them I had a mysterious scar on my stomach would have made them think it was just a side effect of my clumsiness. Or worse, that I had done it to myself. 

I didn't believe it when the flare-ups stopped at first. I just thought I was having a lucky streak. Going six months without my stomach feeling like it was being ripped out was a new record for me. The scar was still slashed across my abdomen, but I hardly ever noticed it anymore. I just decided to push it to the back of my mind and move on with my life. 

I had the second dream the night after my twenty-first birthday. I was still hungover from the night before, trying desperately to get the world to stop spinning as I flopped onto my bed. To say I fell asleep seems almost too polite for what it was. I blacked out and found myself falling, deep into a dark abyss which opened and once again set me down in the dark of a forest now dimly lit by the few stars that spattered the sky. My gaze drifted to the sky, staring at the faint bits of light that seemed as though they would go out at any moment when I greeted again by that same wheezing, now more labored and strangled than when I had been here last. I followed the same trail I’d walked before, now lined with leaves fallen from the trees above. A pale beam of starlight lit my path, and I was able to see the outlines of their decaying forms crunching below my bare feet, misshapen and filled with holes bored into them by disease. I tried not to look at them, to push their disfigured dying forms from my mind until I found myself once again at the mouth of the cave, its unforgiving darkness staring back at me. I forced myself to walk forward, determined to find whatever it was making that awful noise. It seemed to be back where I had heard it all those months ago, each turn feeling similar to my previous journey. This time, as I rounded the corner to where the wheezing was the strongest I was able to catch a glimpse of a form outlined against the dark. It was human, or at least it looked human, hunched over on the ground at the center of the opening. As I moved closer to the being, it's head fell backward, mouth open wide as it let out a choked moan. I neared the sad creature's shoulder, but as I reached out to touch it I was jerked awake by the obnoxious beeping of my alarm, my heart racing as I sat up.  
No.  
Not my heart.  
The one that was placed inside of me.  
I don't know why my first instinct was to scramble to take my shirt off and look at myself, but when I saw the raised skin on my chest I went completely still. The scar from open-heart surgery isn't one that's easily forgotten. They call it 'The Zipper', and with good reason. A long, thin scar that traced down from the base of my neck to just above my abdomen, splitting my body in half. I didn’t know what to do. This new, unfamiliar heart that pumped blood through my veins, its beats steady and normal. Something my old heart never gave me. My fingers traced the rough skin that had grown over the scar. Like the one on my stomach, this one looked like I’d had it for years, not just woke up to find it this morning. I wasn’t sure what to make of this fast-healing night surgeries. Whether they were to be a blessing or a curse. I felt better, sure, but this meant someone- no. Something was coming into my room and moving the organs inside my body, tampering and replacing while I slept and leaving without a trace. I couldn’t even find any evidence that I bled. I felt better, sure, but I couldn’t ignore the fact that parts of me were being taken out of me. I tried to push it to the back of my mind, to be grateful for the fact that my body was starting to work properly. But soon I found myself back there every night, different parts of my endocrine system were taken and exchanged for functional ones, each time a new scar. The stars’ shine grew stronger every night until I had a full view of the warped, twisted trees that spread their diseased leaves on the ground I was forced to walk on every night. The holes bored into their limp, brown forms always made me nauseous to look at. I tried to stop the dreams, to just resist the pull to the cave and the vaguely human form that lurked inside of it. But every night I was back, and every night I wandered that twisting cave, always waking up before I saw the beast that lurked inside. 

I would be lying if I said that I wasn’t relieved when it all ended. Even ending how it did. It was about a year after this had started when I opened my eyes to find myself once again wandering through the trees. Elderwood trees, I later found out, all riddled with some unknown disease that left them contorted and misshapen. A moon shone in the sky for the first time ever. But instead of the pale silver beams that one would expect, its harsh rays tinted everything a sickly pale green. I didn’t go to the cave this time. Instead, I followed the sprawling path to its end. I should have known this was the end. One last time in this forest that I’m now certain was connected to Hell, why wouldn’t it let me explore beyond what I had already seen? I don’t know how long I’d been walking for when I came to the hill. All I know is that once I arrived I felt forced up it, my feet making their way through dead yellow grass dyed green by the moonlight. It wasn’t until I reached the top that I was once again greeted by the mysterious humanoid figure that I had seen every night for so long. Only it wasn’t bathed in the darkness of the cave anymore. No, a ray of moonlight shone down on it like a spotlight, its beam reflected in eyes that were cloudy with cataracts. My stomach churned as I finally saw what I had looked for every night. Torn muscles clung to its arms and legs, attaching them to its weakened body, where a maze of torn stomachs and intestines with lining burned by ulcers. A nauseating combination of grafts of skin darkened by melanomas and bits of tumor-laced Elder leaves tried in vain to cover the stringy blood vessels and arteries that crossed this thing that hardly counted as a body, connecting it to a heart whose beats were shallow and irregular, blood squirting out of the aorta like a horrible crimson fountain. _My_ heart, I realized as my knees grew weak. My heart, that had been taken from me so long ago, now used to power this… this thing that stood before me, made from the body parts of others that had walked this path before me. It wheezed at me through tar-clogged smoker’s lungs, as though trying to form a scream. Its mouth spread open, baring its brown decaying teeth as leaped towards me. In my shock, I pulled back violently, sending me rolling back down the hill and into the leaves below. It raced after me as I sprinted for the trees in at a speed I didn’t think was possible with the body it had. I ran deeper into the brush, the heart that wasn’t mine rushing to pump blood into my veins as adrenaline took over. I didn’t even look where I was going, which proved to be my downfall in the end. My foot caught on one of the twisted elder roots and sent me tumbling to the ground as the beast bared down on me, grasping my wrists in its warped hands. 

The pain woke me up before I could see what it did. It felt as though a thousand knives were being driven through my back as I found myself choking on some unseen obstruction. I hardly remember falling out of bed, or army crawling to my roommates’ bedroom as I gasped for air. I have no recollection of coughing up elder leaves stained scarlet by my blood or blacking out on their floor as they called the ambulance. I only remember waking up in a hospital, hooked to more machines than I could count as they fought to stabilize a body weakened from blood loss and a botched pneumectomy.  
You can live a full life with only one lung. The doctors told me that when they released me. They still don’t know how I managed to just wake up without one, or how the infected leaves that replaced it got inside, and I have no drive to tell them. I don’t know what that thing did with its prize, whether it kept it separate as a prize or attached it to its collage of malfunctioning parts, and I have no desire to know. Let it keep the thing in its array of unusable organs, it can be the one working cog in a failing machine.

Humans are not made for the lives we lead, our flaws built into our genetic coding through years of evolution. Our knees and spines aren’t made for what we use them for, our retinas are backward compared to other species, and our voice boxes are misplaced. We are imperfect machines with parts that break down and malfunction, and leave us debilitated. I have had my broken parts replaced, and I have seen what became of them. Yes, we humans are poorly designed, but I have seen what happens when changes are attempted, and I don’t wish it upon anyone.

Statement ends. There’s hardly much follow up that can be done on a dream. Martin reached out to Ms. Nelson for a followup statement, however she stated that she wanted to make no such thing and promptly hung up. Can’t say I really blame her for not wanting to elaborate on something like that. Sasha was able to find records on Ms. Nelson’s hospital stay, confirming that she was indeed admitted to A&E on 19 September 2007 with lung failure, only to find out that she was, indeed, missing a lung. The report mentions also finding “Foreign Objects” lodged in her throat and where a lung once was, which was probably the elder leaves Ms. Nelson brought up. Beyond that there’s hardly much more to be said, and Lord knows I have more… _pressing_ matters to attend to.  
Recording ends


End file.
